Not Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom". Rather this is a journey back to
medieval society where all income is subject to taxation by the Church
or the manor or both. At least in the current case it is freehold rent
which is paid in cash rather than the labor rent that villeins and
serfs owed their liege.

The easiest way to create a dependent class is to price them out of the real estate markets.

"In countries fully settled…those who cannot get land must
labor for others that have it; when laborers are plenty, their wages
will be low; by low wages a family is supported with difficulty; this
difficulty deters many from marriage, who therefore long continue
servants and single...."

In the United States The Land Ordinance of 1785 set the cost of land
purchased from the government at $1.00 per acre in sections of 640
acres.

This price was raised to $2.00/acre in 1800 but purchase was paid for in four equal annual payments.
In 1820 the price of Federal lands was reduced to $1.25 per acre with payment in cash.
An alternate conveyance in the 1862 Homestead Act maintained the $1.25 price.

Compare the wages various craftsmen could command:

In 1785 a journeyman carpenter in New York City was paid $1.12 ½ per day....

And today's installment, from Naked Capitalism:

Yves here. Michael Hudson regularly discusses how classical
economists were concerned with h[ow] rentiers diverted from productive
activity and would discuss land rents as a prime example. This article
discusses how this line of thinking was abandoned and how that has led
to distortions in contemporary economic analysis.

By Josh Ryan-Collins, senior economist at the New
Economics Foundation, as well as a visiting research fellow at the
University of Southampton Business School. He was the lead author of
Where Does Money Come From? Follow him on Twitter: @jryancollins.
Originally published at Evonomics

Anyone who has studied economics will be familiar with the ‘factors
of production’. The best known ‘are ‘capital’ (machinery, tools,
computers) and ‘labour’ (physical effort, knowledge, skills). The
standard neo-classical production function is a combination of these
two, with capital typically substituting for labour as firms maximize
their productivity via technological innovation. The theory of marginal
productivity argues that under certain assumptions, including perfect
competition, market equilibrium will be attained when the marginal cost
of an additional unit of capital or labour is equal to its marginal
revenue. The theory has been the subject of considerable controversy,
with long debates on what is really meant by capital, the role of interest rates and whether it is neatly substitutable with labour.

But there has always been a third ‘factor’: Land. Neglected,
obfuscated but never quite completely forgotten, the story of Land’s
marginalization from mainstream economic theory is little known. But it
has important implications. Putting it back in to economics, we argue in
a new book, ‘Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing’,
could help us better understand many of today’s most pressing social
and economic problems, including excessive property prices, rising
wealth inequality and stagnant productivity. Land was initially a key
part of classical economic theory, so why did it get pushed aside?

Classical Economics, Land and Economic Rent
The classical political economists – David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill
and Adam Smith – that shaped the birth of modern economics, emphasized
that land had unique qualities, distinct from capital and labour, that
had important influence on the dynamics of production.

They recognized that land was inherently fixed and scarce. Ricardo’s
concept of ‘economic rent’ referred to the gains accruing to landholders
from their exclusive ownership of a scarce resource: desirable
agricultural land. Ricardo argued that the landowner was not free to
choose the economic rent he or she could charge. Rather, it was
determined by the cost to the labourer of farming the next most
desirable but un-owned plot. Rent was thus driven by the marginal
productivity of land, not labour as the population theorist Thomas
Malthus had argued. On the flipside, as Adam Smith (1776: 162) noted,
neither did land rents reflect the efforts of the land-owner:

“The rent of land, therefore, considered as the price paid for the
use of the land, is naturally a monopoly price. It is not at all
proportioned to what the landlord may have laid out upon the improvement
of the land, or to what he can afford to take; but to what the farmer
can afford to give.”

The classical economists feared that land-owners would increasingly
monopolise the proceeds of growth as nations developed and desirably
locational land became relatively more scarce. Eventually, as rents
rose, the proportion of profits available for capital investment and
wages would become so small as to lead to economic stagnation,
inequality and rising unemployment. In other words, economic rent could
crowd out productive investment....